MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- Hewlett Packard Co. (HP) is jumping on the small business bandwagon with a storage appliance priced at under $10,000 that will support iSCSI and network attached storoage (NAS), and include backup software.

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The company preannounced the product at a press event Monday but declined to share the technical details until it ships in September. HP's news comes a couple of weeks after Network Appliance Inc. (NetApp) launched its StoreVault product aimed at small businesses and EMC Corp. reiterated plans for a major assault on this sector via its relationships with Intel Corp. and NEC Corp. Right now, EMC has just one product for small and midsized businesses (SMB) and that's the AX150, sold by Dell Inc. and Intel.

"Small customers don't have the money or the expertise to manage
Fibre Channel [
storage area network] SANs," said Debbie Young, worldwide marketing manager in HP's storage division. Gartner Inc. reports that up to 70% of small businesses are still using
direct attached storage (DAS) because the migration from DAS to SAN is perceived to be too complex.

"To perform an Exchange server migration from direct attached to networked storage takes 30 steps, which is too long and complex for most small companies," Young said. HP's new low-end array, which starts at $5,000 for 1 terabyte, will be based on Microsoft Windows Storage Server and will enable this kind of migration in less than 10 clicks, she said. "Even I can do it."

Users will be able to move data without taking applications like Exchange down and manage the migration from an application view. "They are used to working in Exchange and Sequel they understand that view," Young said.

Commenting on NetApp's StoreVault product, she said: "They made an SMB version of Data OnTap [NetApp's storage operating system], it's easy to understand if you already understand storage, but it's still too complex for the general IT administrator."

Unlike StoreVault, which cannot be upgraded to the company's midrange fabric attached storage (FAS) product line, HP's low-end box will be upgradeable to its MSA line by swapping out the disks.

However, there seems to be some confusion within the company on how to differentiate the low end of the MSA family, namely the 1510i iSCSI array from the new SMB box.

In a separate presentation, Kyle Fitze, director of marketing for HP's SAN division said the MSA 1510i was aimed at first-time storage users. He clarified that the 1510i would offer better performance as it's a block-based array versus the new SMB appliance that is more of a Swiss army knife approach, combining iSCSI, NAS and data protection features into a single "all-in-one-appliance." The "single purpose system will always offer better performance than the multipurpose device," he said.

Why now?

According to Ash Ashutosh, chief technology officer of HP's storage division, there are three elements that make the timing right for this kind of storage appliance for small businesses. "A more rapid adoption of standards, tighter integration of previously separate domains, i.e. applications, servers and storage; and the distribution model is there," he said. HP plans to spend $20 million marketing the new SMB product this year.

Greg Schulz, founder and analyst with StorageI/O Group notes that the battle lines are being drawn in the SMB space, but as yet no one is making much money from this market. "It'll be interesting to see if it pans out and Gartner's stats mean anything," he said.

Lastly, HP announced reference configurations for organizations undertaking business intelligence projects, the message here clearly being that users need to buy more storage and servers to avoid poor performance.

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